We could easily grow enough food to feed the planet – if only it was produced
efficiently and in the right places

Malthus is shaking his hoary locks. The old seer does it every so often, and no amount of being proved wrong will keep him in his coffin. His latest manifestation takes the unlikely form of Sir David Attenborough, one of television’s otherwise warmest personalities. Sir David thinks that the population of the planet has reached capacity, and that we had better tell the world to stop making babies. For good measure, in his interview with The Daily Telegraph yesterday, he added that getting the UN to send sacks of flour to famine regions was “barmy” and that famine in Ethiopia is about “too many people for too little piece of land”.

He is not alone. Jonathan Porritt, the environmentalist – and like Sir David, a patron of the lobby group Population Matters, which argues for “living within the constraints of renewable resources” – has written about famine in the Horn of Africa and put the blame squarely on the failure of women to control their breeding habits: “It’s no good blaming climate change or food shortages or political corruption. Sorry to be neo-Malthusian about it, but continuing population growth in this region makes periodic famine unavoidable – as many have been pointing out since the last famine.”

There’s something in this, of course. Malthus hasn’t been proved wrong: it’s simply that he hasn’t yet been proved right. The catastrophe that Sir David and others predict could come about. Take the wildlife that he loves: with the world population now at 7 billion, and heading for 9 billion by the middle of the century, it can only become rather less wild. Other, less congenial landscapes will be created – ones in which people have, in one way or another, intervened.

Already, adventurous holidaymakers discover that it is practically impossible to find a true wilderness, other than places that support no life at all, like deserts. Even the polar ice caps are no longer pristine. Large mammals exist only because humans permit them to do so. Increasingly, they will live in places designated specially for them, if they continue to live at all. This is a great sadness, particularly for romantics like me. But let’s remember: we started it. Except for the river estuaries, everywhere in Britain has been altered and exploited by people.

For the human animal, the consequences will, in one respect, be similar. We will increasingly live in reserves – only they will be called cities. They will be vulnerable to sudden fluctuations in the supply and price of food, and the cataract that haunted Wordsworth like a passion will be funnelled through a pipe to produce electricity.

But don’t pin the blame on babies. It’s not the world’s birth rate that is the problem here, so much as reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy. Fewer babies dying and more of the older generation surviving for longer must surely be good; nevertheless, the number of people to feed will soon be huge. We are already seeing the difficulty of doing so expressed in food riots, as bad harvests around the world push grain prices to unaffordable highs.

At present, the underlying problem is not an absolute shortage of food, so much as an absence of it in the right places. According to Peter Kendall, President of the NFU, too much food around the world is allowed to rot. Crops are eaten by pests because farmers don’t spray them with insecticide.

At the end of the Second World War, many farmers in Britain still ploughed with horses and recoiled from using “artificial”, as they called fertiliser at the time. Fields are now harvested by machines as big as houses and inputs such as fertiliser are applied using computer and satellite technology. Simply applying these techniques across India, Africa and South America would fill the bread baskets of the world to overflowing. That is without even mentioning the miracles that could be wrought by GM, by enabling drought-resistant crops and blight-free potatoes to flourish.

If this revolution doesn’t take place, an accusing finger will point at those people who stopped it. Robert Mugabe has destroyed the agriculture of Zimbabwe for political ends. The European Union sucks in food from the rest of the world because it doesn’t want its inefficient peasant farmers to go bust. Oxfam now recognises that “The romanticisation of 'the peasant’ and rejection of new technologies and trade have the potential to lock farmers into poverty.” Aid charities haven’t always.

Sir David is a master communicator: he knows how to make a point and is not averse to shock tactics. No doubt that is why he disparages sending sacks of flour to the starving. But the phrase contained an undoubted truth. It isn’t sacks of flour that are needed. Until recently, the United States undermined the agriculture of the developing world by dumping its subsidised food surpluses at below market prices. This prevented local farmers from making money, discouraged enterprise and entrenched food dependency.

Far better is to export improved techniques and new ideas. This is recognised by innovative charities such as Excellent Development, a beneficiary of the Telegraph charity appeal in 2009, which encourages communities to build sand dams that provide clean water. Innocent Smoothies supports a charity that teaches farmers to build little rings of mud around the shoots they plant; this simple technique means that water is maximised rather than lost.

Lack of water could, say the doomsters, put a cap on agricultural production. Climate change is expected to make things worse. Rising temperatures could also turn marginal land into desert, presenting the almost insuperable task of producing more food from less viable land. These issues will be discussed next week at the Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival, whose president is the food campaigner Caroline Cranbrook.

“There’s nothing to be cheerful about,” she says. “The solution can only be to get more sustainable agriculture. Everybody has got to do their bit. This applies to the local community as well as to farmers and scientists. Local agriculture won’t feed Shanghai or Mexico City but it will help some people feed themselves. Above all, it will heighten people’s awareness.

“Over 200 or 300 years we’ve used up natural resources, like oil and minerals, which were laid down over billions of years. There is already massive soil erosion. You can see it from the air in some parts of the world – great red stains of sea where the soil has been washed off the fields.”

Nature has a way of regulating the stresses that it is put under through disaster and disease. Disaster includes wars, which may be unavoidable as people fight for scarce resources. We can surely expect epidemics. Aids may not have been quite as virulent as some predicted when it was first noticed, but there will be other zoonotic diseases.

Slum-dwelling urban populations – driven off the land by shortage of water and desertification of land – are the most at risk. One of the features of the population bubble is that many countries have a disproportionate number of young people. They tend to be volatile, particularly when short of work. This can be seen in the Middle East.

In Britain, governments don’t have to be moral, only reasonably far-sighted, to see that it is sensible to encourage self-sufficiency. We could start by protecting farmland and not building over it. We are lucky to have some of the most innovative farmers in the world. Even so, we import around a third of our food, having been encouraged to rely on produce grown overseas.

Demand is likely to mean that food becomes more expensive. Will that manage the demand for food, by dissuading the Chinese from eating American-style hamburgers and our own young people from becoming obese? Or will rich countries such as Britain continue to stuff themselves with food, because they can afford it, while elsewhere in the world the poor starve?

We are lucky to have many things in our favour. Britain has plenty of rain. Our agricultural land could actually become more productive as a result of climate change – conditions are expected to deteriorate almost everywhere else.

But we have no reason to be smug. The recent surge in our own population proves that we are as much connected to the world as anywhere else. When shortages bite elsewhere, people will come knocking at our door. We must try as hard to find answers as anyone else. A global campaign against wasting food would be one place to start.